Our Three Week Project…

Hello all! So over the past 3 weeks or so, I along with a few fellow classmates, have been researching tactics on starting a YouTube channel. We watched many different videos, from a variety of channels. This helped to give us a view from many angles on how the created an audience and managed to keep them interested throughout the video. Next, we tried to compile all these ideas into one document to all add to as a group; however, this never was accomplished. Which leads to my next point, cooperation. We all realized at the beginning of the project that we had too many people, but we decided to go with it as we were all friends and confident in our ability to work as a productive group. The further we got into the project, the more we realized that it was not going to work. We started to get more and more off task. It eventually got to the point where little to nothing was getting accomplished, in which Mr. Wettrick met with us about. He explained that our act in great need of cleanup.

I think that if our group was to go back to the beginning, we would definitely have had less people in our group, closer to 2 or 3. Also, I believe that we would give more of an effort to collaborate with others and within our team. In fact, we didn’t even really have a mentor. We had ideas for one, and attempted to contact a few, but yet again we gave up after little effort. With 5 team members, it was a challenge to include everyone’s ideas. This means, when our channel art was in the works, everyone had input for it; and like mentioned, it was difficult to capture all of these ideas into one document. During the second week, everyone began to see the holes in both the group’s communication, and the group’s lack of effort. We brought it upon ourselves to hold a meeting regarding this. A few of our members discussed interest in leaving our project due to the lack of participation, effort, communication, interest, and etc. At this point in time, it became evident that our project was not going to work. I, along with another member, still wanted to continue on with the channel, however, that possibility is slowing fading as it has become an impossible task.

At the beginning we were all hyped to start, and get the channel running as soon as possible, but with some advice from Mr. Wettrick, we planned to research and plan before any recording and editing was done. In my opinion, this is what sparked our unanimous loss of interest. I believe that in all of our minds, we had a grand plan to grow the channel as fast as possible. However, we didn’t fully understand how this would be accomplished. We just wanted to start. From my perspective, this project, even though it was quite the journey, was in fact a very informative experience. It was a great learning project for future ones. Even though we weren’t successful with our original intentions, I think we all learned a lot. Working in a group of 5 would not work for us, communication is KEY, in order to get something from a project you must put in the effort, and that if something isn’t worth the time then it is acceptable to abandon it at an earlier stage versus a later one. This isn’t to say a YouTube channel is an utter waste of time, it is to say our experience with one was a bit rough.

I personally feel as though if we had a better start and understanding of what we were getting ourselves into, that it would have made for a much more “successful” project. In the future I think that it would be a great experience to collaborate with Zach King, aka FinalCutKing. In fact, he was one of our mentors we intended to get in touch with however didn’t. So in conclusion, I had a love/hate relationship with the project. It was awesome to learn all these different elements in working with a team and what worked and what obviously didn’t. Like previously mentioned, if I were to do it over, I definitely would have started with a more solid base. I can honestly say, the elements learned from this experience will be essential in the success of future ones.